Food preparation traditionally requires a significant amount of manual labor. The preparation of a typical meal may require selecting a cookbook from a shelf of books, identifying a recipe of interest in the selected cookbook, generating a shopping list for the recipe by comparing it against an inventory of ingredients on hand, purchasing the items on the shopping list, preparing the purchased items in preparation for executing the recipe, and executing the recipe utilizing a variety of cooking appliances (e.g., food processor, microwave oven, convection oven, slow cooker, etc.) by compiling specified quantities of ingredients in a specified sequence at one or more temperatures for times of varying duration.
Various parts of the task of food preparation have been automated or are currently subject to efforts to automate them. For example, GOOGLE RECIPE VIEW offered by Google, Inc. of Mountain View, Calif., permits users to search the World-Wide Web for recipe content that utilizes particular ingredients. The embedding of computer processors and network interfaces in household appliances for remote operations over the Internet offers the prospect of automated operation of these devices.
One obstacle to such automation is the difference in skill sets expected of food preparers and appliance programmers. Food preparers are traditionally skilled in following instructions and possibly sharing those instructions with other people having varying levels of skill in food preparation. Programmers are traditionally skilled in software development, packet-based network communications, etc. While programmers may enable the automated operation of various appliances, they may not do so in a user-friendly way that would let food preparers readily take advantage of that functionality.
Accordingly, there is a need for methods and systems that can bridge this gap and thereby provide recipe management.